![\"A.](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/ADC_September_2013.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u00a0Just Gimme Some Truth<\/strong><\/p>\n John Morris’s assurances<\/a>, reiterated countless times over seven decades, that the emulsion on Robert Capa’s D-Day negatives melted after “just a few minutes” in an improvised, overheated, closed film-drying cabinet in LIFE<\/em>‘s London darkroom on June 7, 1944 constitutes, to some extent, a verifiable or impeachable statement. So I decided to put it to the test, as best I could. My conclusion: This never happened.<\/p>\n For those unfamiliar with darkroom practice, a\u00a0film-drying cabinet has one main purpose: Protecting wet film from dust and other airborne debris, as well as fingerprints and other damage from handling or accidental contact, while its gelatin-based emulsion is still soft, moist and adhesive after processing. For that reason, film cabinets have vents, to increase air circulation; air filters, to eliminate as much dust as possible; and doors, for restricting access.<\/p>\n Film-drying cabinet design, patent diagram, 1940.<\/p><\/div>\n Thus it’s standard practice to shut the doors of a film-drying cabinet; indeed, it’s normal to keep them closed except when inserting wet films and removing dry ones. It’s habitual amongst darkroom techs everywhere to do so. Purposely leaving them\u00a0open in a bustling multi-user darkroom such as LIFE<\/em>‘s UK facility\u00a0would be unusual, and risky, since any passing party\u00a0with basic darkroom training would tend to close them without thinking twice.<\/p>\n Professional-quality film-drying cabinets<\/a> typically have some combination of exhaust\u00a0fan and vents, to remove moisture while increasing\u00a0air circulation, together\u00a0with a thermostatically controlled heating system, to warm the incoming air. Both of these speed the drying of films. Morris describes LIFE<\/em>‘s London darkroom as relying instead on an inexplicably makeshift arrangement involving a wooden clothes locker with its doors kept open and a “heating coil.”<\/p>\n If he’s telling the truth about this, Morris’s highly unprofessional decision to\u00a0approve the use of a film-drying arrangement that would leave the films vulnerable to dust and damage when running the jury-rigged heater surely proved a foolish economy.<\/p>\n Back Bearings<\/strong><\/p>\n A few pertinent facts:<\/p>\n Cin\u00e9-Kodak Super-X film package<\/p><\/div>\n The film Capa used, as indicated on its edges, was Cin\u00e9-Kodak Super-X Panchromatic Safety Film, rated at 50 ASA. (The designation “safety” meant that its backing was cellulose diacetate, much less flammable than its predecessor, nitrate.)\u00a0As its name implies, this was intended primarily for use in movie cameras; you’ll find it indicated for that purpose in this PDF of a 1940 Kodak movie-camera manual<\/a>.<\/li>\n Immersion heating coil<\/p><\/div>\n Of course, the vague term\u00a0“heating coil”<\/a>\u00a0may confuse matters, as it usually describes a small electrical device used for bringing a cup of water to a boil for instant coffee or tea. This seems an unlikely device to repurpose\u00a0for the drying of film, since most models will\u00a0shut off if not immersed in water, and you wouldn’t boil water under film you’re trying to dry. Possibly they used a hot plate or space heater turned on low, though Morris surely knows the difference between a heating coil and either of those alternatives; moreover,\u00a0the latter seem like risky devices to use in close proximity to acetate-based\u00a0films in a wooden cabinet,\u00a0even when open.<\/li>\n Vintage Eagle (brand) “Cone Glocoil,” ca. 1940<\/p><\/div>\n [Note, July 21, 2015: Most film-drying cabinets don’t use anything that involves high heat; you really just need enough heat at the bottom that the hot air will rise and suck in cooler air, so that there’s a bit of circulation. Normally I just turn on the 25-watt bulb at the bottom of mine.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Anything that could get very hot very quickly would risk blowing a fuse or starting a fire. Conceivably, in\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>LIFE<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>‘s darkroom,\u00a0 it was something as simple as this \u2014 a low-voltage electric coil that would screw into a standard light socket and give off a bit of heat. This, and other such elements, were used in hatcheries for chicks and insects. Since you didn’t want to cook your eggs and larvae, but just keep them warm, the heat they provided was minimal \u2014 certainly not enough to damage film in “a few minutes.” \u2014 A. D. C.]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em><\/li>\n John Morris, “Get the Picture” (1998), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n Even if\u00a0they had either a hot plate or a space heater running on high in that wooden locker, I can’t imagine how its internal temperature would have reached emulsion-melting levels in “just a few minutes.”\u00a0Given the urgency of the situation, with Morris’s “rush rush rush” demand for contact prints, the films can’t have stayed\u00a0in that locker for more than 10\u00a0minutes before Banks or another darkroom staffer returned to check on and retrieve them.<\/li>\n Hans Wild, bio note, LIFE magazine, February 8, 1943.<\/p><\/div>\n According to Richard Whelan<\/a>, “John Morris \u2026 was waiting in his office when the films finally arrived, and Hans Wild<\/a> and Dennis Sanders [sic] were standing by in the lab. \u2026 When the negatives came out of the developing solution, Wild told Morris that they were fabulous.” This suggests that Wild\u00a0did the developing, or else that\u00a0Sanders\/Banks did so under his direct supervision, with Wild performing a spot inspection of the end of at least one roll before it went into the fixing bath.<\/li>\n The High-Temp Drying Cabinet Test<\/b><\/p>\n Tatung Heat Devil II<\/p><\/div>\n The premise of John Morris’s account of the accidental destruction of Capa’s films, of course, is that gelatin-silver emulsion melts at high temperature in an enclosed space in “just a few minutes.” This is demonstrably false.<\/em><\/p>\n As it happens, I have a darkroom in my basement that has gone unused for many years, and it includes a wooden film-drying cabinet: 75″ high, 29″ wide, 15″ deep, or 18.8 cubic feet. So I ran an experiment.<\/p>\n Not having either an immersion heating coil or a hot plate handy, I substituted\u00a0a compact 6×7-1\/2″ Tatung Heat Devil II, a portable ceramic space heater that puts out 5200 BTU and reaches its set\u00a0temperature within a minute. I suspect this heats up much faster, and puts out more heat, more efficiently, than whatever “heating coil” they supposedly used in London in 1944. I hung a newly soaked strip of previously developed and fixed Tri-X film from 1993 at the top of the cabinet.<\/p>\n A. D. Coleman, scan of test negative strip, June 10, 2014.<\/p><\/div>\n I started with a room temperature in the cabinet of 80\u00b0F (10 degrees higher than my estimate of room temperature in London on that day), and the Tatung\u00a0set on medium.<\/p>\n I admit this doesn’t qualify as scientific. Tri-X in 1993 isn’t identical to Super-X in 1944. I’ve no specifics on the size of the “wooden clothes locker”\u00a0LIFE<\/em>\u00a0used (though I doubt it was smaller than my cabinet). I’ve no idea what kind of “heating coil” they had in it (though I doubt it was more powerful and faster heating than my Tatung).<\/p>\n Nonetheless, my experiment resulted in nothing remotely resembling John Morris<\/a>‘s “pea soup.” No\u00a0sign of\u00a0Cynthia Young<\/a>‘s amazing horizontal “emulsion slide.” Nor Marie Brenner<\/a>‘s “Without ventilation, the heat melted all of the emulsion off the film.” Nor Steve Meltzer<\/a>‘s over-the-top “film emulsion \u2026\u00a0melting before [Dennis Banks’s]\u00a0eyes, running down the hanging strips before he could do anything.”<\/p>\n * Robert Capa, spoiled frames from D-Day, June 6, 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n Moreover, since (by both Capa’s account and mine) the\u00a0surviving\u00a0images came at the end of a roll, they’d have hung at either the top or bottom of the cabinet. Whatever the temperature in either position, the same portion of all four rolls would have been subjected to the same temperature conditions for the same amount of time. That this section of only one of the four rolls survived in the way Morris proposes simply makes no sense, as Ross Baughman points out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, if emulsion melt due to brief exposure to high heat in a film-drying cabinet happened so easily, the literature and lore of the medium would overflow with accounts of similar incidents. Instead, the Capa D-Day story remains unique in the annals of the medium. That Capa himself, though not present when this one-of-a-kind incident\u00a0supposedly occurred, endorsed it in his 1947 memoir,\u00a0Slightly Out of Focus<\/em>, does not make it true.<\/p>\n Microfilm is\u00a0a 35mm acetate-backed film that\u00a0also has a gelatin-silver emulsion.\u00a0The Washington State Archives Microfilm Standards protocols<\/a> for film preservation state that “Silver gelatin [films] can withstand temperatures as high as 302 Fahrenheit for several hours without significant loss in image quality.” According to the Kansas Historical Society<\/a>, “Tests have indicated that acetate-base microfilm that has been conditioned at a relative humidity of 50% or lower will withstand 250 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours without significant loss in readability or printability.”<\/p>\n Robert Capa, D-Day frames from 6 June 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n So I feel confident in asserting that the emulsion of gelatin-silver film, in 1944 as today, did not and does not melt and run down its acetate backing after just a few minutes in a closed wooden cabinet heated even to 150\u00b0F by any simple, off-the-shelf heating unit. This constitutes pure fiction. High time we recognized it as such, and began to discuss the implications thereof.<\/p>\n For the past 70 years a “darkroom lad” \u2014 initially anonymous, but subsequently identified by Morris as one Dennis Banks \u2014 has carried the blame for the ruination of Capa’s negatives. If he’s not just a figment of Morris’s imagination, I hope these posts serve to exonerate him, albeit belatedly.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n (For an index of links to all posts in this series,\u00a0click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n [Note: Subsequent\u00a0research by Rob McElroy<\/a>\u00a0revealed that all supposed examples of Capa’s “damaged” D-Day negatives published in the May 29, 2014\u00a0<\/em>TIME\u00a0video, such as the ones above (*), were forgeries produced by Magnum in collusion with the International Center of Photography. While this renders irrelevant the above analysis of those frames, it does not undermine my\u00a0broader<\/em><\/em>\u00a0challenge to the “melted emulsion” narrative. \u2014 A. D. C.]<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n John Morris will participate in\u00a0a conversation with Robert Pledge<\/a>, founder and director of Contact Press Images, at the\u00a0International Center of Photography on June 24, 2014. They’ll stream it, so you can\u00a0watch it\u00a0live online at\u00a0www.icp.org\/live<\/a>. Clicking on that link will enable you to submit a question in advance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Film left in my darkroom drying cabinet for almost two hours at temperatures that ranged from 80\u00b0F to 150\u00b0F \u2014 and between 135\u00b0F-150\u00b0F for an hour \u2014 remained intact. So I feel confident in asserting that the emulsion of gelatin-silver film, in 1944 as today, did not and does not melt and run down its acetate backing after just a few minutes in a closed wooden cabinet heated even to 150\u00b0F by any simple, off-the-shelf heating unit. This is a fiction. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[788,15,945,946],"tags":[939,944,938,917,937,940],"class_list":["post-21049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analog-photography-2","category-news-commentary","category-photo-history","category-photojournalism-2","tag-d-day","tag-dennis-banks","tag-john-morris","tag-life-magazine","tag-robert-capa","tag-time-life","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Film-drying](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Film_dryer_patent_1940.jpg\")
<\/a>\n
![\"Cin\u00e9-Kodak](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Cine_Kodak_Super_X_film_package.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Immersion](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Immersion_heating_coil-.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Vintage](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Eagle_Cone-Glocoil_vintage.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"John](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Morris_Get_the_Picture_1998_cover.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Hans](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Hans-Wild_bio_note_LIFE_2-8-43.png\")
<\/a>![\"Tatung](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Tatung_Heat_Devil_II.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"A.](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/ADC_test_scan_6-10-14.jpg\")
<\/a>\n
![\"Robert](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Capa-Robert-Spoiled-frames-from-D-Day-001-6-June-1944.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Robert](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Capa-Robert-D-Day-frames-from-6-June-1944.jpg\")
<\/a>